Field
This invention generally relates to cleaning of glass articles, and in particular glass substrates used in the manufacture of high performance display panels.
Technical Background
As the line widths of thin film transistors on glass substrates become thinner, technology that removes submicron sized particles effectively so that the transistor is not interrupted by the existence of these contaminants are increasingly in demand. The same can be said for the color filter industry, as contaminants are known to adversely affect black matrix adhesion and resulting RGB pixel integrity. For example, for the color filter industry it is known that black matrix peeling events occur more frequently with narrower line widths. Current industry information indicates the frequency of peeling events are about 2.8% for 19 μm black matrix line widths and 0.3% for 27 um line widths. It is expected these frequencies will increase with decreasing line width. For thin film transistors, it is further expected that this trend will be the same, and removal of increasingly smaller particulate contaminants will become more important. Nevertheless, no industry standard exists for the display glass industry for submicron particle removal, unlike that which exists for the semiconductor industry.